“And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, and deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast.”  Fire from heaven upon Elijah’s sacrifice was the attestation of God to his divine mission.  Bringing down fire from heaven, then, symbolically describes the claims of this beast to being a true prophet of the Lord.

At this point we must make a distinction which, being true in the facts of history, must necessarily be intended in the symbolic representation.  According to the symbols of the preceding chapter the woman, or true church, “fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.”  The time-prophecy is the same and covers the same period as the reign of the Papal beast; therefore just as an important change in the Papacy occured at the expiration of the prophetic period, so also we must expect a radical change with respect to the true church:  it must no longer be completely obscured in the wilderness.

As the Reformation, and Protestantism as a religion, was the means of ending Rome’s universal spiritual supremacy, so also the same movement must be regarded as possessing sufficient light and truth to again bring into prominence the work of the Spirit and the true people of God.  “Fire from heaven” may therefore be regarded as describing the divine work of reformation, the unfolding of truth accompanied by the saving power of God.  Such spiritual work has accompanied the origin of various religious movements during the Protestant era.

The general description of the two-horned beast, however, brings into prominence an evil characteristic—­the disposition to lead people into deception by making an image to the beast and then worshiping it.  The evil does not inhere in the work of bringing down “fire from heaven,” but in image-making and image-worship, for which the Spiritual work simply furnished an occasion.  The Spiritual work of reformation is therefore to be distinguished from the later work of creed- and sect-making.  And since the beast takes advantage of Spirit manifestations, in order to deceive men, he becomes a sort of apostate and is denominated “the false prophet.”  See Chap. 16:14; 19:20.

Ecclesiastically considered, the two-horned beast stands as the symbol of the religious system of Protestantism as a whole—­a peculiar combination of truth and error, of good and bad, of “fire from heaven” and false, miracle-working power (chap. 16:14); while the “image to the beast” signifies the sectarian institution—­the man-made, man-controlled, unscriptural sect machinery manufactured in imitation of the Papal original.  To exalt such earth-born churches and lead people to adore and worship them